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This article looks at the development of the relation between social divisions and voting in Germany in the Bundestag elections after German unification. Considering the data from German electoral studies since 1994, it examines how social class impinged on support for the Social Democrats and for the post-communist PDS/Left and how church attendance and religious denomination affects the tendency to vote for Christian Democrats. It seems that it is much too early to write off the electoral relevance of social cleavages. The ‘core constituencies’ of cleavage-based parties have anything but disappeared and still show marked differences in voting patterns. In addition there are striking east–west differences in the patterns of electoral behaviour, especially regarding support for the post-communists. There is some, though not overwhelming, evidence of change in the social patterns of voting. But these changes hardly justify the elimination of the concept of social cleavages from electoral research. Instead, the results are consistent with the view that the politicisation of social cleavages depends on parties' appropriate mobilisation strategies and policies.

This paper mainly explores how law-based neo-functionalism can contribute to explain the legal development of the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) in the last decades. The neo-functionalist approach developed by Burley (Slaughter) and Mattli in the 1990s expects spill-overs because it assumes that subnational actors try to overcome national law in order to pursue their interests by means of preliminary proceedings before the European Court of Justice (ECJ). It also presumes political dynamics as a consequence of a general strategy of the European Commission to widen the scope of the EAEC’s and/or its competences by means of actions against member states. By analysing ECJ case law on Euratom, the paper shows that the mechanisms and phenomena highlighted by this particular neo-functionalist approach do not occur in the case of the EAEC. It is concluded that a revised version of law-based neo-functionalism which takes into account, inter alia, context factors such as the interdependence of deregulation and reregulation is likely to have more explanatory power.

Detecting election fraud with a simple statistical method and minimal information makes the application of Benford's Law quite promising for a wide range of researchers. Whilst its specific form, the Second-Digit Benford's Law (2BL)-test, is increasingly applied to fraud suspected elections, concerns about the validity of its test results have been raised. One important caveat of this kind of research is that the 2BL-test has been appliedmostly to fraud suspected elections. Therefore, this article will apply the test to the 2009 German Federal Parliamentary Election against which no serious allegation of fraud has been raised. Surprisingly, the test results indicate that there should be electoral fraud in a number of constituencies. These counterintuitive resultsmight be due to the naive application of the 2BL-test which is based on the conventional v2 distribution. If we use an alternative distribution based on simulated election data, the 2BLtest indicates no significant deviation. Using the simulated election data, we also identified under which circumstances the naive application of the 2BL-test is inappropriate. Accordingly, constituencies with homogeneous precincts and a specific range of vote counts tend to have a higher value for the 2BL statistic.

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the moderating role of top management team (TMT) longevity on the TMT diversity-firm performance relationship.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents results from a quantitative longitudinal study of 59 TMTs in German companies in different industries.
Findings – For age diversity, dominant educational background diversity, and diversity in dominant industry experience, the curvilinear moderating effect of TMT longevity on the TMT diversity–firm performance relationship is confirmed. However, for organizational tenure diversity, the form of the moderating effect is contrary to expectations (being u-shaped).
Research limitations/implication – In line with previous studies, the results were sensitive to the performance measures in use. Furthermore, the results should not be generalized since they may be sensitive to the sector under study and the small sample size.
Originality/value – First, a curvilinear moderating effect of TMT longevity on the TMT diversity-firm performance relationship is investigated for the first time. Second, although the selected diversity dimensions have been investigated in previous TMT studies, they are examined simultaneously for the first time. Third, this study analyzes TMTs of large and medium-sized German corporations operating in a variety of sectors. Fourth, relating demographic data on TMTs collected in 2004 to performance data for the years 2004 to 2007, the present paper presents one of the few longitudinal studies in the context of TMT diversity.

Empirical research on the effects of functional diversity on team innovation has yielded largely inconsistent results, showing positive, negative, as well as nonsignificant effects. For capitalizing on the positive potential inherent in functionally diverse teams, opening the black box between cross-functionality and team innovation by analysing mediating and moderating processes thus seems to be highly relevant. In this article, task and relationship conflicts are introduced as mediators of functional diversity and team innovation. Within this framework, transformational leadership is discussed as a moderator. It will become apparent that the role of transformational leadership in fostering the innovativeness of cross-functional teams is rather ambiguous. The discussed mediators and the moderator transformational leadership are integrated into a comprehensive framework and propositions for future research are derived.

We consider the advantages and disadvantages of three different approaches that are used for forecasting international politics.

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dc.contributor.author: Searle, Rosalind; Den Hartog, Deanne N.

A central problem for improving the implementation effectiveness of European legislation lies in the impact of national administrative traditions. The dependence on national administrations for implementing European policies implies that the formal transposition and practical application of supranational policies are crucially influenced by administrative traditions prevalent in a certain policy field, which may differ substantially from country to country. Focusing on the implementation of EU environmental policy in Britain and Germany, it is the objective of this article to investigate the interplay of national administrative traditions and European policy implementation in closer detail. The main argument is that the extent to which administrative traditions affect implementation effectiveness is less dependent on the "real" costs of adaptation than on the level of embeddedness of existing structures.